Reflections on MLK Day, 2026

Dr. King's Dream is gone from our politics. But it's still alive in American culture.

Stained glass windows at the Ebenezer Baptist Church at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site (Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress)

It has felt hard to connect with the spirit of the Civil Rights movement for many years now. Dr. King’s Christian-rooted message of universal human equality and the need for America to overcome her racially oppressive past has seemed not only distant, but dispiritingly co-opted, if not corrupted. So I was grateful to be in a Chicago church service yesterday where it came alive for me once again. Combined with the memory of other, similarly uplifting experiences I’ve had in the past decade, it made me realize that if Dr. King’s Dream is nowhere to be found in today’s toxic politics, it’s still very much alive in many parts of American culture.

Today’s terrible political dynamics have successfully sold far too many people on the belief that if they only keep attacking their presumptive enemies and raging about whatever they see as our most pressing societal evils without ceasing, that will somehow magically transform the situation and make everything better. But that’s not the case. The only way to turn the negative tide is to change the energetic dynamic. And you can’t do that through fear, hate, anger, resentment, and violence.

It sounds strange to say, but it’s true: Transforming such intense negativity requires spiritual work. And that’s what Dr. King did so effectively. Which is why his life and legacy rightfully remain at the heart of what so many Americans understand to be the best of our shared democratic project. Because he wasn’t only a political leader; he was also a spiritual one.

Right-wingers who insist America is “not a creedal nation” and left-wingers who denounce her history as nothing more than evil settler-colonialism are both wrong. America’s most inspiring collective vision remains what it has been since the beginning:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The deliberately quasi-religious but yet not religious language of the Declaration conveys the point clearly: This foundational American Creed represents both a political and spiritual commitment. And it’s not one that’s limited to adherents of any particular faith or ancestry. No. It includes everyone who’s part of the American republican-democratic project.

The fact that most Americans believe in the fundamental truth of this statement is why Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement occupy such a central place in our culture. The oppressive treatment of Black Americans was an evident contradiction to this foundational Creed. And as long as there was a collective sense that we could and would move past that terrible history and into a new era that more closely approximated it, there was a shared sense of aspirational optimism in America.

Today, the vibe, as they say, is completely different — and not in a good way. The more you remain immersed in the intense negativity of the news of the day, the more such old-school aspiration can only seem stupidly misguided or tragically doomed. And certainly, there’s no telling what will happen to the U.S. as a nation. Currently, no signs suggest that our politics will significantly improve anytime soon. So at least for the foreseeable future, we seem stuck in a downward spiral.

That said, I’m still able to go to church every Sunday and see literally hundreds of Chicagoans from a remarkable cross-section of this enormous and diverse city worshipping together with obvious sincerity and heart. More prosaically, it’s the same at my local Costco: People from a wide cross-section of Chicago are happily shopping together, whether Black, White, Asian, South Asian, Latino, or whatever.

Such experiences aren’t political. But they are cultural. And they are significant. Because they exemplify the fact that there are countless people who, despite whatever differences they may have, enjoy cooperating in common enterprises, living together in peace, and being part of the same urban community. And that’s a beautiful thing to experience and see.

Plus, this isn’t only an urban phenomenon. While I’ve never lived in small town or rural America, I’ve travelled there plenty and met many people who do. Consequently, I’m confident that the all-too-prevalent progressive urban conceit that the American hinterlands are full of deplorable racists is not simply morally offensive, but factually wrong. I’ve been in cafes and bars in small town Wisconsin, Montana, and Kentucky that are far more comfortably diverse than many places in Chicago — which, despite the nice things I’ve just said about it, remains a city that’s deeply divided by not only race, but class (a category that affluent urban progressives always studiously ignore).

Which is certainly not to suggest the U.S. is some sort of Kumbaya paradise: Obviously, that’s so not the case, it’s beyond laughable. But I do want to insist that there are plenty of places in this country where you can still connect to that fundamentally American vibe of a culture in which people really do believe in the values of Freedom and Equality, with heartfelt authenticity and without intellectual pretense.

Bottom line, I put any hopes that I may have for the future of America in the best of the spirit of our people. And to the extent that this divided and diverse country shares a common spirit, I believe it remains rooted in that foundational American Creed of the Declaration. It’s important to realize that this isn’t a commitment that most of humanity has traditionally held. Nor is it one that we should expect to be easy to maintain. Because thanks to our inevitably flawed human nature, it will never be perfectly realized.

Yet we can reorient to this value as a lodestar — not through our toxic politics, but through the ways in which we live and encounter each other in our ordinary, everyday lives. So Happy MLK Day, America. You can’t see it on the news but you can experience it in your life: Dr. King’s Dream is still alive.